NZXT PODCAST - #100 - Pete Hines

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

This week on the podcast we're joined by Bethesda's Head of Marketing and Communications: Pete Hines! We talk about soccer, dirty keyboards, and QuakeCon! Follow Pete at twitter.com/dcdeacon Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on twitch.tv/NZXT and send your questions to: podcast[@]nzxt.com

and welcome everyone to episode 100 of the NZC Clubcast, the official podcast of the NXT community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 10 a 10-JN Pacific Center time with the official NZXT Twitch channel and is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. So get locked in to get your eardrums ripped and torn, tear, teared, something like that with some sweet, sweet podcast words. My name is Dennis.

I am the social media, I guess I'm so specialist at this point. I don't know what's going on with the titles. And with me as always is Ivan. Your official title is Papito. True, true. And you are my poppy, right? Yes, sir. And I can't believe, man, 100 episodes,

and we still haven't been sued by Nintendo for using that music. So we're working on it. That's the big goal, right? I think it's when you made it, right? Like if Nintendo notices, then we're good pretty much, right? That's kind of where you land in there. No such thing as bad publicity, right? Exactly, right? Can you imagine that?

That's only been said by people who don't know what bad publicity really looks like. That would be me. To honest, though, if you kind of go over the past like year and a half, we kind of experienced quite a bit of that. So we definitely know, but I think we like to pretend, right, there's no such things about publicity. Today's special guest is, okay, I'm going to say this totally wrong. So please correct me if I do say this wrong. I googled it. I linked in it.

I wanted Twitter, everything. It's fine. Senior vice presidents of global marketing and communications, Apotheza, Pete Hines. You nailed it. Hey, how are you guys? Congrats, first of all. Before we go any further on 100 episodes, that's awesome. You guys should be super proud.

That's a lot of podcasts. It is. Every Thursday, I think we probably miss like two or three weeks here and there for random things. But, you know, the goal in the beginning was literally to get to seven episodes because we saw this stat. I said most podcasts only last seven episodes. So we're like, if we can do seven episodes, we're already like ahead of the game. You crushed it.

You destroyed it. Congratulations. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you. And thank you for being here on episode 100. Of course. It's even more special that you're here chatting with us. Happy to be here.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it was the choice between you and the guy who does the voice on Halo. And unfortunately, we couldn't get him. He was on cameo. He was way too busy for us. So maybe the problem was you you asked him, hey, you're the guy who does the voice from Halo. Would you like, did you actually use his name or did you just say, hey, guy who does the voice in Halo? Do you want to come on?

That's the good point. I actually, because I don't remember what his name is either. So I'm not bailing you out here. I can't remember. I think his name is Halo guy. Yeah, I think it's his name. Right. It's his halo guy.

I mean, to be honest, if I was him, I would just go by that all the everywhere, right? I would have that as my Twitter handle as my Twitch, you know, whatever. It's the halo. It's easier, right? That's how you know me. I'm the halo guy. Exactly. But I know. Thanks again for being on. You know, we're, I mean, I'm sure Ivan is as well. I mean, huge friend of Bethesda and like everything you guys have been doing out there. I mean, I've been playing your games since your games is since forever. I mean, I remember the first, like, real, like, high powered PC I built was for oblivion. And it's still going to run well because my computer was just not that great.

But I mean, yeah, I've been a huge fan for the longest time. That's awesome. Well, we appreciate the support. It's great. So, you know, really exciting to talk to you. We got a lot of questions for you, a lot of things to talk about. First off, though, folks, for those who are listening or watching live on Twitch, we do have a giveaway.

Hit up an exclamation point giveaway in the chat. And we're giving away some game codes, courtesy of our friends here at Bethesda. But we're going to be talking about a lot of things here. We're going to be bug and pee with a lot of really wonky questions. talking about QuayCon, dirty keyboards, all kinds of stuff. So you guys are in for a really, really good one. So Pete, can you just quickly give us a rund down of what you do at Bethesda, just like what your day-to-day is, what you're in charge of?

Well, as you said, I'm the global head of marketing and comms, which I have been since I first joined Bethesda in 1999. Please don't tell me what grade you were in or how old you were when I started at this company, if you would be so kind. I've been here ever, ever since. I started when Bethesda was tiny. I mean, we were, you know, 20 people total, including devs and everybody else in sort of Bethesda proper.

You know, we fit essentially in one little hallway in one floor of the building. And so as a result, because I was in on the ground floor, I got involved in a lot of other things that weren't exactly marketing and communications because, like, it's a small shop. everybody pitches in and does whatever. So as a result, I have had the pleasure getting involved in a lot of things, whether it's playtesting things or business development or, I don't know, you name it. And I'm still here all these years later.

How did you actually get that job? I had reached out about a position they had available. I mean, if I'm being blunt, because I was looking for something. I was a director of marketing at the American Association of Blood Banks. And after about a month, I realized I could not, my soul was going to tear into if I did that for an extended period of time. And I reached out to Bethesda, but I don't remember what the role was anymore, but a guy by the name of Todd Vaughn reached out and said, hey, we'd love to talk to you about a position

looking to fill to run our, you know, to be the director of our marketing and PR. and at the time I was writing for a gaming site, which isn't around anymore, but I was sort of doing that on the side just for fun. And I had background doing a lot of marketing PR stuff and sort of combined my two jobs into one. And here I am. And Todd Vaughn is still with us as well. He's our senior VP of overall of our development. So we're both still there all these years later.

I wonder what that blood bank is up to now. They're still around. talking about aphoresis and stem cell research and, you know, continuing education. Just not my thing. Yeah, blood bank. Blood bank marketing sounds a lot harder than video game marketing for some. It's exactly as exciting as it sounds.

Yeah. So I guess the next, the follow-up question to that is a little, the follow-up question to that is a little bit random. I know your official title is the senior vice president of global or marketing and communications, but everyone calls you Uncle Pete. Why? Why does everyone call you Uncle Pete? I think that goes all the way back to some years ago when I was on,

I think it was right after a Quaycon and I would go down to Virginia Beach and play in this big soccer tournament down there. And I was down there with my wife and I started posting these like summer fun tips. I was just goofing around and having fun. And I couldn't figure out what to call him, and I decided that everybody needs a cool, fun uncle. Both my parents are only parents. So I never actually had an uncle, and I was like, you know what? Everybody deserves a cool, fun uncle.

My brother is an amazing uncle to my two boys. And so I just said, hey, here's Uncle Pete's summer fun tips. And it's sort of stuck and blew up from there, I guess. Is it cool if me and Dennis call you Theo Pete? See? Very good, Theo. Awesome. Great, perfect.

So what are, so you've mentioned that you were at, you've been at Bethesda for, I'm going to say a long time, but you've been there a good amount of time, right? A great amount of time. What are some of your favorite past projects that you've worked on? Oh, that's a tough one. I mean, literally every game this company has shipped over the last 20 years, good, bad, and different. Whether it was your favorite game ever or you hated it more than anything you've ever played, I worked on that in some way, shape, or form. And so, you know, you spend a lot of time working on a project, you know, start to finish.

It's sometimes four years, five years, or even longer before you ship it. So in some ways, they're kind of like your children. And so it's hard to pick between your favorite kids. You know, different ones have different special meaning for me. Morwind, just being, I mean, honestly, it's the reason why Bethesda still exists. When I joined Bethesda, it was not humming along as a well-oiled machine. It was right after Zinamax had acquired it, it was essentially about to go under. And so, you know, we were running.

and lean and we really needed that game to to hit and to do well and it did um so you know i have really fond memories of that just because like the untold number of hours i poured into that like i wrote that entire manual um i edited the entire strategy guide if you've ever seen the morwin prophecy strategy guide i was the editor-in-chief for that thing while it was also doing marketing and PR and you know events and community i was the only marketing person in the it was me and a marketing artist that was the the whole department. So, you know, that's special just because you can't, you can't go through something like that and not have it leave a lasting impact on you. Just the size of that challenge. You know, oblivion was really fun because it was when we broke through to the console side and we

took a chance at like, hey, we want to make it for this new console that Microsoft's making called the Xbox and we think we could, you know, actually technically get it to run on that console. And so bringing that to a whole new audience was really big and scary. and you know, you go through, you know, whether it's some of the arcane stuff that we worked on, or, you know, before we started the podcast, we were talking about machine games and the Wolfenstein games. Like, I have really fond memories and, you know, working with devs you'd never work before and sort of learning how each other operates and figuring out how to make each other better and to do things that are really cool and fun and awesome, you know,

and each and every one of those is special in their own way. That's crazy. How long does it take to write a game manual? That seems like it would just take like my entire life. I, a couple of weeks at most. I mean, look, nowadays, like, it doesn't. Like, when's the last time you got a game that had a manual in it? That's a relic of a bygone era.

And one that, honestly, it's a little sad, right? We used to love doing our manuals because we would kind of do them in world. And, you know, we'd break down for you for more when, like, what the different classes of spells did or combat skills or whatever. It was sort of fun to dig into all of those things. But yeah, that one, I think we threw together in a couple of weeks where it was just Todd one day was like, I really need you to do the manual. And I was like, I've never written a manual.

What do I do? And he's like, here's roughly what I wanted in, you know, what I wanted it and what I wanted to cover. And I was like, okay. And I just started typing and, you know, we'll work with folks on the dev team. like, hey, does this seem right? Or am I explaining this right? And taking screenshots to show off UI.

But, you know, it's one of the things I've really enjoyed about this company is being able to literally say there isn't a part of this that I haven't had some involvement in whatever it is from writing the manuals to, you know, to everything else. And you have a background in writing too, correct? Yeah. I mean, my degree was in marketing, but even when I was at Wake Forest, you know, I had a number of different jobs and one of which was working, not surprisingly, in the sports information department, which, I mean, it's basically like the PR and marketing department for the athletic programs at Wake Forest. And so I was helping write, you know, the programs for, you know, for different sports and writing press releases and fact sheets and stuff like that. So I had, you know, a variety of different kinds of experience. And you figure out pretty quick, like, you might know how to write, but I bet you don't know how to write a manual because technical writing is very different than like creative writing or press release writing.

You know, every one requires a slightly different mentality and approach. And so in part, it was, it was fun to do that just to understand the difference between, you know, when you're writing for this purpose versus you're writing for some other purpose. And during that time, when you were in college, writing and all that, were you already playing video games? Mm-hmm. Yeah. When did you start...

For sure. When did you first start playing video games? Probably when I was like... 10? My dad, again, this predates all of you. You can all Google this, all of you watching Twitch, because I assume 99% of you aren't going to know what I'm talking about. But my first computer was called a VIC-20.

It didn't have a hard drive. It was just a keyboard. I remember the Christmas that I... got a cassette drive to save programs on it. And there used to be a magazine called Run Magazine that my dad subscribed to for my brother and I. And it used to come with code in the pages. They would print little programs for various things.

Now, I always skipped over anything that wasn't a video game. And my brother and I would sit down with our crappy typing skills. You know, we were 11, 12, 13 and we would take turns typing in the code for these games just to get them to run so we could play, you know, stupid little games and we get syntax errors and have to go back through our code and figure out where our typos were. But like that was my first foray in the games. And then shortly after that, I figured out that you could get a modem and connect to other people. And like I remember a good friend of mine at that I went to high school with named Tom Trenton opened me up to the world of like

BBSs and connecting to a BBS with your modem to like download stuff. And he would get me copies. So when I got to wake, I was somewhat savvy. One of my jobs was actually I was a computer lab manager back when nobody really had their own PCs. You had to go to the labs that the university had. And so I would manage those. And while I was in there, I played, you know, a lot of art of war and space word ho and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, so up on the stream right now for the folks, I got a photo of the VIC-20. It's a Commodore.

So, yeah, this is what we used to use, well, what we, but this is what people used to use back in the day, folks, when you wanted to play video games. The VIC-20 was what you got when you really wanted a Commodore 64, but your parents didn't want to spend that much money. So you got a VIC-20 instead. That's what I got. It's actually funny because my first PC game ever was Doom running on MS-DOS. And my dad taught me how to like to do all the commands so I can get the game to run.

And like I still remember that time finally. Like he just comes home and say, hey, here's a computer. I'm like, what the heck is his thing? He's like, type the stuff in and this game pops up. And I'm like, all right. And then that was just a wash. I just, I was hooked ever since then. Yep.

C drive, run, doom. Is that? Is that what it was? I don't remember. It was like C drive. Run like that. C drive. I believe that's what it was, the command.

If somebody knows, please tell us, because now I'm really curious of what the actual commands would be if you were to throw in like a floppy. Yeah. That's such an interesting story. Like, I'm sure like you're, You know, your parents didn't get you that computer thinking, yeah, this is going to, you know, help little Petey here learn all about video games. Honestly, its main purpose was to replace a typewriter because before then, I was doing all of my papers on a typewriter and using whiteout, which again, most of you probably have never used Abala white out in your life.

But, you know, typing stuff out and white out and all of that was a nightmare. And so my dad was like, hey, you can do this and it'll make it easier. And so that was really what they wanted it for. It's just as you all well know, you give a kid a computer. If it's capable of running games, you've sort of lost them for the primary purpose of that machine at that point. It's games, big gap, everything else. Yeah, that's actually how I started playing video games or PC games and getting into computers is because I had asked my dad for a Nintendo

and he's already sick of watching me play on the Atari all day long and he's like this is making you stupid I'm going to buy you a computer so you can actually learn something useful and the first thing I did was I went over to my friend's house who I knew it was a PC gamer and I was like I want to play that game you showed me and that game was Wolfenstein and he's like

all right let me see your PC and he's like all right you're going to need to get some RAM and yada yada. So I was like, all right, let me get some RAM and I was tinkering with it. And yeah,

sure enough, like that made me an even bigger gamer. Mm-hmm. What were some of your favorite video games growing up? Well, the one I remember having,

the first one I remember having a real impact on me was, I think it's Ultima 3 for the Commodore 64. My brother and I were friends with the kid across the street whose parents gave him a Commodore 64. And so we used to go over there to Cliff's House.

And we would all, me and my friend and my brother and this guy would play Ultima together. And we would take turns, who was playing. And then somebody was always on graph paper duty because back then games didn't chart your progress through a dungeon. So like you had to old school it. So somebody was in charge of graphing out the dungeon as you explored it. So we could figure out where the hell we were and how to get out. And we'd had pages and pages of these. of these maps on graph paper.

But that was my first real intro to role-playing games and love playing that and stuff like Arkon. I don't know if you remember Arkhan. It was like battle chess. And then the first game that I remember like really grabbing hold of me in like a dangerous way were things like the original Siv, where like that was the first game I ever stayed up all night

accidentally playing because I was in total, like, one more turn mode. And the next thing I know, I was still at work. It's like 7 a.m. At the time, I was working at a Catholic high school. This is after college. And I look up and see the janitor at the door, and I figure he's locking up for the day and come to realize, like, no, it's morning and everybody's about to show up for school. And I'm exactly where I was sitting, you know, 12, 14 hours ago when I started playing this game.

And like, I'm still wearing the same clothes. So I had to run in the parking lot. Drive home. Oops, sorry. Had to run home to change clothes and take a shower and come back and pretend like had not stayed up all night playing a video game. I'm sure you're... And then the big one for me, the other ones, you know, I was really in the strategy

stuff. So I remember that, you know, the original Warcraft and Command and Conquer was the Gold Box A&D D&D games. So like Secret of Silver Blades and Pools of Radiance and all of those were like totally my jam, you know, creating your little part. I always named my characters after Tolkien characters, right? So my wizard was always Gandoff and I always had a ranger named Aragorn. So the gold box games, I really have a fond, fond memory of.

And then XCOM was my first real, like, super obsession where I just kept playing and playing it until I finished that game. And then figured out there was this thing called the Internet, where you could look things up to figure out if there was another seat. That was literally how I discovered the internet was trying to figure out if there was a sequel to Xcom and discovered that where I worked, the library had access to the internet. And I started doing searches to see if there was a sequel coming out. And all these years later, here I am, part of the industry. It all led you to hear on the 100th episode of the N60 podcast.

This exact moment. It's all building up to this. So it's really funny that you mentioned. well, I think it's funny, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, like, it's, like, PC gaming, because, um, for me, for the longest time, like, Bethesda, like, like, all these, all these, um, just, uh, I guess, uh, I guess, developers, right? Um, um, have always been, like, in my heart, right? Like, primarily, like, a PC-centric, um, like, just development studio or groups, right?

That's, that's, that's what they were known from. That's where they, they made their reputations. And, uh, and, and, and, yeah, they've experienced, they've expanded out from there, but they are still, you know, in some ways, part of that old school PC development community that really got things going. Yeah. Like, I kind of feel like that's like not, that doesn't really exist as much, right? Like, I mean, you have to make games for everything, right?

You, you can't not do it for the switch or for the Xbox or the PS4, right, or the PS5, but like it's really, it's really cool to, like, I don't know, like, what it is or like how the way you guys position it. And maybe this is like kind of you're doing. but like even though you're showing off, you know, I don't fallout four or something, right? And you're showing it off on a console. It still feels to me like, this is for me, right?

This is for me as primarily PC gamer. And I don't know how you guys kind of do that. If you, and maybe this is like a like two like big brain for this early in the morning. But like how do you like ensure that when you're talking about these games that you're still kind of like, you know, catering to this demographic or that demographic or this subset of gamers or the, or that's upset of gamers? It's a good question. So first of all, you know, that phenomenon you experience of like,

hey, I feel like this is for me as a PC gamer. Like full disclosure, the credit for that stuff really goes to our developers, right? Because many of them, to your point, come from that age in that era of like playing games on PC or learning to code on a PC. And like that's still being really important to them. Like, yeah, I wanted to work on all these different platforms and run. great, but like the PC is like a special, a special thing to me. As far as talking to them, like, sometimes it's just sort of the avenue, right?

Like, but generally speaking, we just focus on like the game. Like, what's the game? What are we making? Why do we think it's fun? We, you know, look, I remember when we tried Morwind, you know, going back to like, what do I remember? I remember when we were working on Morwind and we were told categorically by any number of folks whose names or companies, I will not mention, that this was never going to work.

That Morwin and the Elder Scroll series was a hardcore PC game. Console gamers were not going to get it. It's not something they wanted. Too much dialogue. It was too open-ended. They wouldn't know where to go and what to do. Because let's be honest, if you think back, there was a very, very long period of time. Well, relatively speaking, maybe not that long.

But where consoles and video games in general were considered toys. Right. That's where you found them and that's what they got treated as. They got treated as toys. They were not considered to be a serious form of entertainment in any way, shape, or form, right? I remember going to buy a lot of my stuff at the Toys R Us because that was who had the most game stuff because it was toys. And so, you know, I think you have seen that shift where now people no longer think of like, well, PC is where you game and on console. it's really more about toys or that's for kids.

Like, no, it's not. Like, games are games. And people who like games, like games. And, you know, you can be an Xbox gamer, a PlayStation gamer, a Nintendo game, or a PC gamer, and like the same kinds of experiences or the same kinds of things. Or they could be wholly different from somebody who also considers themselves the same kind of gamers. If you're a PC gamer and you like this kind of stuff, like, oh, I only play indie things

and small little quirky stuff in early access. And somebody else says, nope, I only play. online competitive shooters and I don't have time for any of that. Like, I think that's the great thing about gaming is it doesn't matter what you're into or what platform you play on. Like, there's literally something for everybody out there, no matter what your, your preferences are. And I honestly, I think that's, that's great to see gaming doing that and even pushing the

boundaries further of what that looks like, you know, that a game like Fortnite is platform agnostic. Like, you're a Fortnite player if you only ever play on your phone and you're a, Fortnite player if you only ever play on PC and that's the way it should be. Okay, here's a true question. You can't make fun in me anymore for only playing Super Mega Baseball 3. I just make fun of Ivan because he's only plays like one game ever. But that's, I mean, that's totally cool, right?

I mean, like, I know people who like who literally spend their entire like almost like gaming careers and they, and like all they play is 2K, right? They just play NBA 2K and that's their game. And they'll buy a new console for that game and then that's it. But I have a true question for you, Pete. Okay. Where do Wifu gacha games fall into this gamers realm? And how do you read in?

Sorry, say that again? Okay. I might be getting a little to, to, to, do the weeds here. Possibly, since I just asked you to repeat that. Yeah. So where do the anime, wifu, like, R&G gacha games fall into this? If you know what those are. Vaguely, yes.

And honestly, I have no idea because I've never played one. And like, it's just not my thing. I'd throw it in there. So I don't, they're not really on my radar and I don't. I think they're games. Like, I think there's, if people think they're games, then they're games. We need to get some kind of thing going on.

And it's also a big fun of me because I play a baseball gotcha game on my phone. He does. Okay, so if you don't know what gotcha is, gotcha is basically that whole, you know, I want to get this character. So I'm going to, I'm going to put money into basically what's a R&G box with a very low percentage. And if I get my character,

then I'm cool. and if not, I'm spending another couple hundred dollars. So Ivan would make fun of me for playing these like anime games on my phone. And then he's like, hey, I started playing this really cool baseball game on my Android. And I can like roll for baseball cards. And like Ivan would literally pay the same thing except the anime wifus are real life baseball players, the same thing. Well, look, like the parallel to that for me is actual sports cards, right? Like, how is that any different than me ripping boxes or cases of soccer cards because I'm trying to get, you know, Christian Policist.

cards. Like it's literally no different except the stuff that I'm opening is tangible and in my hand versus not. But like the power of that in a lot of ways is the same, right? When you get it, when you hit the thing and you open the thing that you've been desperately searching for, that feeling, that emotion is the same, whether it's a card in your hand or a thing on the screen or the, you know, whatever it is. Like that's still a powerful, a powerful moment. Yeah, I love baseball cards. and I stumbled across your Instagram, which looks like it's recently created. There's only two posts on there. Well, yeah, I've had it forever, and I've never used it because every time I post on social media,

the conversation, whether it's my personal account or not, it immediately gets turned to work. But I just went to the national. I just went to the big sports card and memorabilia show up in Chicago. And, you know, I was talking to people about my collection. I have a huge U.S. soccer collection. and one of the nicer ones probably in the world. And so many people were like, oh my God, you have to share this collection.

This is incredible. I was showing them a few cards that I brought. And I was like, OK, OK, fine, fine, fine. I'll give it a try. So literally in the last week, I've started posting a few things because I was getting hounded into you have to share your Christian Polisic collection and let everybody see your cards. That's awesome.

Yeah, I was watching the videos this morning. And I love unboxing. So keep it up, man. I hope you turn into like. like an unboxing Instagram account. We'll see. Can you imagine? I'm going to throw it up on the stream for those who want to check it out real quick.

So this is it. How did you get started with card collecting? I'll hold that we to log in. My roots in card collecting actually go back to Cal Ripkin. When I was a kid, probably like sixth grade or seventh grade, whatever age I would have been. I had a friend who had a birthday party at the minor league. baseball team in Charlotte, the Charlotte O's, which then was the minor league affiliate of the Baltimore

Orioles. And Cal Ripkin, if you don't know who Cal Ripkin is, I'm not going to bother explaining, but he's Iron Man. One of the greatest baseball players of all time. It was playing for the Charlotte O's, and we actually got to walk through the dugout, a bunch of little kids with our little Charlotte O's penance, and you got to walk through the dugout and get the players to sign. So I actually got to meet like 17-year-old Cal Ripkin on his way to the majors and ultimately like Hall of Fame career. And he hit like a home run that game and made it some amazing plays. And I was like, this guy's amazing.

Who is he? And I started collecting Cal Ripkin cards when I was in college. I was like, I'm getting every Cal Ripkin card ever created, which, spoiler alert, he has like 25,000 cards. And I'm not even going to come close to collecting every Cal Ripkin card ever printed. But I started then. I started in college just like collecting baseball and even just like wacky stuff. Like I have, I have a mostly complete yo MTV.

V. Raps card set. No way. I have, like, Looney Tunes, like, we've just, a couple of buddies of mine and I were sort of in, so we, football and some hockey. And then I took a long break and got back into it probably five years or so ago because I was like, oh, soccer is becoming this big thing. And like, back then, I played soccer since I could walk, basically. And I was like, oh, soccer's a thing.

and like, well, Christian Polisic was one of my favorite players. I followed his career since he was playing for like the U.S. youth teams. And so I started collecting his cards and then other Americans who came in. And yeah, now it's just a super fun hobby. And I don't know, a way that I enjoy sort of extending my love of soccer and the U.S. or Arsenal. I have some arsenal cards. I don't collect a ton of them. But yeah, it's a fun way to enjoy the sport.

And I love how art collecting became really popular again during the pandemic. I hate that I can't get cards anymore, but I love that there's more people collecting. You know, I think it's a great hobby. And like you said, it's like the thrill of just opening that pack and finding something that you've been searching for. Like, it's an awesome feeling. Yep. Yeah. So you kind of touch on this a little bit, Pete, and we were going to ask you this later on, but we were actually going to ask you like, what's the thing?

who actually ask you like what's up with your Twitter bio like I totally get it right like you'll you'll try to tweet about some cards and people start asking about some random stuff about work right like how on a scale like one to 10 how that how annoying is that I can't imagine is it's fun right um it's less annoying than it used to be because I spent a healthy amount of time um figuring out how to deal with it. Like it's very hard to explain unless you've had to experience what it's like to have untold number of people only treat you as the job that you do. Right.

Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, if I post something about, you know, my wife and I are big believers in helping with adopting and fostering dogs. So we foster dogs when they're too young to be adopted out until they're old enough for somebody. And we fostered for years and years. And I'll post pictures of, you know, puppies that were fostering and, you know,

get snarky comments about why aren't you fixing this bug or why aren't you doing that? So it took me, honestly, a while to sort of come to peace and figure out how to separate those things. Because honestly, it is super frustrating. like if people feel so entitled or empowered to say, I'm not allowed to do anything that isn't the job that I have. You know, I can't post about.

And by the way, it's not everybody. Like, there's lots of fans that I've gotten to meet and who are awesome about, I met some of them at the national. When I was there last week, like people who know what it is I do for a living, but are totally willing to just talk. I mean, don't get me wrong. They always sneak a question in about like, hey, Hey, when are we going to hear more about Ghostwire?

When are we going to hear more about Starfield? But it's nice to meet folks who understand what I do or share that passion but are willing to interact about anything else. Right. Like I said, I love soccer. So I like talking about the U.S. matches or I'm a huge Arsenal supporter. and I actually recently, this year I decided I have a new rule, which is if you reply to anything that I post that doesn't have anything to do with work, with a tweet at me about work, you get muted and I'm done with you.

Like if you can't offer some basic civility and my thing was just tweet at me, like just put my name and tweet at me and say, hey, I have a question for you. I totally fine with that. I don't care. I understand that's part of the deal. But when people try and take anything that I do and turn it back, to work, I'm, I'm done with that. Like, I, I still get to be a human being and, and, uh, and have a personal Twitter account

that I'm allowed to, to do other stuff on. Totally get that for sure. Um, I also just quickly ask, uh, real fast. How do you feel about that US winning against Mexico? So good. You have no idea. I know. Like, so good. I'm torn. I'm torn because I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm Hispanic, right?

My, my dad's from, so my desk for Nicodagh. They don't have a team. So he just reached for Mexico because he lived there for like five years. And my mom's Mexican, right? So like I want to root for the Mexican team, but I live in the U.S. So my like hierarchy is I go U.S. first, then literally everyone else falls under that, right? Mexico, then like the Latin American countries. And then basically anybody from like the Americas.

And after that, it's like, you know, the African teams, whatever. But I wish it wasn't on penalties, but I'm so happy that it happened. Because they're always super hype to watch, right? It's like the most hype thing ever. there's like there's nothing like just watching like just the one v one where's it going to go are they going to block it right yep it goes ham yeah honestly it's it's after a pretty disastrous uh world cup qualifying and missing out on on russia it's it's great to see the the youth movement and all of these i mean kids i'm allowed to say kids i have boys one's 18 one's 22 who are

the same age or older than like half of our national team is 18, 19, 20, like, it's just, it's so hard for me to believe that that these young men at such a young age are going off and playing in countries where they don't speak the language, they're living by themselves, and they're able to compete at such a high level professionally, and then get the, you know, what I consider to be the greatest honor you can have as a player, which is to represent, you know, your country on a global stage. is awesome. Do you think so?

So yeah, great to see them do well. Because like I like maybe because like I'm not the biggest fan ever. Like my dad's a huge fan. Somebody maybe he has a different idea and I should probably ask him about this. But like I think I think it would be awesome to play for like the national team. Right. You're like representing your country where you came from where you're born.

Right. Like who you identify as. But I feel like in terms of like maybe how other people see it, I think they have more like affinity for like their they're like big clubs or something. Right. Oh, listen. I totally get and respect. that, but I'm just not wired that way, in part because for me, there was a U.S. national team before there was any of those things here. Right. Right. For sure. Yeah. I grew up in the era where I got

beat up a lot. I was a really little kid, like short growing up. I didn't really get a gross bird until college. But like I grew up in the 80s. Like it was not cool to play soccer. You got your ass kicked for that kind of stuff by all the by literally everybody else because it was a you know it was a wimp sport um so to see how soccer is grown and been embraced that you know you mentioned your your um your parents are from nicaragua and mexico i actually lived in mexico city when i was a kid uh for a year that's actually where i started playing soccer was like i that's where i was old enough to start kicking a ball around with my dad in the courtyard um when we live there and uh so you know i i I love that passion that, you know, that the Latino community has for, you know,

but there's folks, like you said, who live and die with, you know, Club America. Like, that's it. That's their team above everything else. And then there's folks who say, no, the national team is more important. Like, I don't judge. Whatever, whatever's your jam, like, I think that's awesome. For me, like, if I had the, you got, you could do anything you wanted one time before you go. I think mine would probably be like, I would love.

to pull on the kit and play for my country. Well, until COVID, I still played. I haven't played now in 18 months, but, you know, even after hitting 50, I still play pretty competitively. How

how much time you've lived in Mexico? One year. And why you're living there? I cannot answer that in Spanish, so I'm going to answer it in English. My dad had a grant. study the transit system in Mexico City.

That was what he went to graduate school for. So I was born in Puerto Rico. See, I got some Latino roots. I was born in Puerto Rico and my dad was in the Coast Guard. And then we moved to Milwaukee because Puerto Rico to Milwaukee is a pretty well-known pipeline. And then from Milwaukee, we moved to Mexico City for a year. And my parents met in the P-Score. So my parents both grew up speaking Spanish and met in the P-Score in Panama.

So my dad was always in part really dialed into soccer because it was such a big thing. And the Hispanic community. Shouldn't you be cheering for the Puerto Rican soccer team then? Don't judge me. I am technically Boricura. Like I am born on the island in Puerto Rico, Boricua. But it was on the Coast Guard base and I'm, yeah. But I do.

I pull for him. And I'm still available to play if they need a, you know, if they need somebody to fill out squad for the next, for the next match, like I am around. So your dad worked on the transit system, you said? Yeah, yeah. My dad went down to Mexico City to study the transit system in Mexico City.

And then that's what he, he was an assistant manager and then a manager of like city. So I like grew up most of my life I spent in Charlotte, North Carolina. and my dad was the general manager of the bus system. Like I took the city bus to grade school and all through high school until I could drive because my dad ran the bus system and was like, hey, my kids, you know, my kids need to ride the bus. You know, I work for the bus system perfectly viable.

You should ride the bus. So I rode the city bus until I was 16. And like the reason that's so interesting to me is because I think Mexico City has the worst traffic in the entire world. Like, uh, actually, I think, it's a congestion. I think that highway in China is the worst, no? The one, you know that my very first memory as a human being took place in Mexico city and it's because I cracked my head on my brother's crib when I was goofing around like

I was three or four and he was a baby in the crib and I split my head open here on the side. And my first memory is being strapped down in a straight jacket to a. table in the emergency room so they could stitch up my head because they didn't do anesthesia on little kids. And so I literally, my first memory was cracking my skull open and then the trauma of being stitched up with no anesthesia local or otherwise in a Mexico City hospital. Welcome to the world, kid. I'm actually going to pull up right now a tweet from 2017 at Pete put up of the hospital he was born in San Juan. Well, at least where it used to be. Okay. And it's It's not a hospital anymore.

Now it's a building museum. And I think that tweet does highlight. There's no plaque there denoting that that's where I was born. Like it's my birthplace. We should make that happen. Let's do it. Like birthplace of video games. Yeah, right?

As seen on the, you know, on the 100th episode, like nothing. Maybe now I'll get one. Maybe now that I've been on this for your 100th episode. Maybe this will be the final straw. This should be like in a fallout map. of some of them. Pete's birthday.

Actually, that'd be pretty funny if that was like a little Easter or something they threw up there. So speaking to which, let's get into some QuakeCon stuff because, I mean,

that's, you know, that's ultimately why you're here. I mean, well, you're here because we actually really want to talk to him. We think you're super cool.

But, you know, you know, we do have Quake Khan coming up super soon. Yep. Can we talk about the history about QuakeCon? Because for me,

like, when I was growing up, it was always just, like this giant awesome land party that I never got to go to because my parents were like, what the heck is a land party? Like, stay home. How did it start? Quaycon actually started in like a conference room. I don't remember which hotel it was.

But it's like the equivalent of like a Best Western. And it was basically a bunch of folks who loved playing games getting together on their own to say, hey, we love games. and like let's all get together and play quake and we'll you know we'll connect our computers together and have a session and you know there weren't a ton of you know it's not like it was 5,000 people it was like 25 or 30 or 50 i don't remember the exact number and i remember the john carmac and i'm pretty sure will it's probably most of it ended up stopping by there at some point um just to chat with them like out in the parking lot whatever like that was the first quake on it wasn't some big formal thing it was just just like a bunch of folks getting together based around a game that they loved and wanting to play games together. And, you know, all these years later, that's still at the heart of what this show is about, which is it's really about people who have a shared passion and love of games,

regardless of what type getting together for, you know, fun and gaming and rockets and love. And, you know, and we also managed to raise some money for some good causes. and give away cool prizes and all of that. But it really, at its core, has been a community-driven, community-focused chance to get together and play games. That's awesome. Yeah, I've always wanted to go to a land party. I know, like, they're not as big as it used to be.

Or then I was, oh, actually, I might be talking to my ass there, but, like, I feel like just because of the internet, right, people just kind of congregate there. But I feel like, just hop on, like, hey, let's jump on. Yeah, yep. But you've never, you've never been to QuakeCon? I've never been to QuayCon. I've always wanted to go.

To QuayCon. One of these days, we're going to get back in person. And I tell you, you can go to Pax. You can go to E3 or Gamescom or Paris. Like, I've been to all of them, at least once. There's nothing like QuayCon. Nothing. Like, it is so unique and different.

There are literally generations of gaming, gamers coming together. Like, we have volunteers who have, you know, now have kids who are volunteers because they've been bringing their kids to QuakeCon since they were little and now their kids are in college and they're bringing their friends and they're like, it's just a great familial feel and everybody's super nice and get along and it's just about having a good time, having fun and celebrating games. Have you ever taken your own computer to QuakeCon? I have not. I have not. I have gone and sat in the BYOC.

a number of years, but usually when I do it, and this is sacrilege, although again, because QuayCon is awesome, nobody ever gives me crap about it, but I always actually just take an Xbox because I've taken my boys a couple of different years, and Xbox is actually the platform that we game on together. Because I honestly, like, I don't do a ton of PC gaming.

I haven't had a gaming PC in my house for forever, because I don't know, I just didn't. Like, I do a ton of gaming at work, playtesting our stuff. But yeah, I would just take my Xbox and play, you know, Overwatch with my kids or Rocket League or Fallout 76 or, you know, whatever I was playing. And, yeah, it doesn't PC console, like, we don't judge.

Just come and join and play and have fun. Nice. Yeah, I'm looking through your guys' Instagram right now for QuayCon. There's a lot of cool stuff. I want those shirts and those joggers look really, really comfy. So I might pick up some swag. I'm a sucker for T-shirts and for pants. I don't know why.

I got my cat loop shirt on today. We're doing a couple of shirts for raise money. So I got my, that's the cat one. And there's an awesome if you're into it or Doom or shooters. We have the pugubis as well. Yeah, it looks super good. That one's awesome. And you click on that.

I think I'm looking for the link on it. I also wanted to ask a question too, because I keep seeing balls here, and like I haven't seen balls in the longest time. And for those who don't know, balls is an energy drink. It's been around forever. Like,

I remember it was like the first like gamer energy drink. Like, how did that, how did that come around like that? I don't think I've ever really got an explanation on that other than like, much like the origins of QuakeCon itself, like it was entirely driven by the gamers. Like,

yeah, they would, If one of the interesting things about QuakeCon is there are a healthy number of people who consider it a badge of honor to like not sleep during QuakeCon. Oh yeah. I heard of that. 24 hours of gaming three days in a row. Don't stop. Don't be a quitter.

Don't take a shower. I don't happen to agree with that approach. But one of the early tools that they used for their gaming binges was balls and it's been a part of QuakeCon. I mean, we do chugging contests and you'll never see more cases of that stuff in your life than when you're at Quaiccon. Like, it's literally everywhere. It's hard to find a Red Bull at Quaycon because everybody's drinking balls. Yeah, I don't like, I'm assuming people like are buying it just like regularly like, you know, like on the street. But like I don't know if the last time I saw like a bottle of this guy here in the shower.

If you're watching the stream, you guys got in the shower, you see. This is his can of balls, shower balls. Pauls is to gaming, what Fago is to juggalo's. Pretty much, right? It's like a, all right? It's like a very early, like early 2000s late 1990s, like gaming things. I remember I used to go to a PC cafe back in the day to play CS before they're on Steam to go Counter-Strike.

And I think the only thing they had there was balls. there was like no coke or anything like that and then uh barbecue lays it's only anything i don't know why they only ever stock barbecue lays i don't like barbecue lays but that was that was it yeah we don't and we don't usually get the bottles because obviously with the for safety reasons like yeah try not to have a lot of glass so it's pretty much all the cans yeah i actually wasn't where they're doing cans and they they have the little the little balls ripples i don't know he called the whole bit the ribbing on the like some of this now.

I know. I kind of want to go in on some balls soon. Ivan, let's go pick up some balls, dude. The marketing work, Pete, we're going to buy this stuff.

This is all a royalty check is being cut somewhere at balls for me for whatever that's worth. It's all a clever ploy to sell some balls. That's, that's all it is. That whole thing came from, like,

the fans who were super and the gamers who were super into it. And balls, of course, totally embraced being the drink of choice for all of these games. gamers and the rest is kind of history. Besides

Ball's Energy Drink, what's your favorite thing about QuayCon? Honestly, just getting to be there and chat with people. Like, you know, I, there's lots of folks that I've, I don't know how many, well, until COVID hit, how many in a row I'd been to it, might have been 10

or getting close to 10 before we had to go virtual last year. So like just getting to see familiar faces and chat with folks like everybody's super friendly. That's my favorite part. Just getting to see people and sort of like enjoy how much it means to them to get together, how much they appreciate that, you know, our support in trying to help put on a show

that they'll really enjoy. Just being there amongst the folks and getting chat with people is kind of the best. And how hard was it to do that or to keep up that same spirit, I guess, with last year and this year, you know, that it's all virtual. It's a pretty crap substitute, if I'm being honest. Like, what we've tried to do is, you know, to embrace, like, getting together and having fun. But look, there's no substitute for face-to-face, right?

We're all at however many months now, 17 months of dealing with a lot of not face-to-face or at least severely limited. And, like, you can tell. You can feel it. You spend a month not talking to anybody. face to face or, you know, in my case, I spent 20 years working at this company. And every single day at work, I worked with the people. I didn't ever work from home. We always worked in the office. And so to go from that to suddenly, you know, doing everything over a camera, it's, it's just not the same.

But at the same time, you know, we felt like it was important to figure out how do we still come together as best we can to sort of celebrate and enjoy as much of this as we can without the face-to-face part. And, you know, last year, I think, you know, the feedback we got was, hey, it's not exactly the same as being there in person, but this is still pretty great, and it's better than having no QuaqCon at all. And we learned some things and took some feedback and are trying a few new things this year. But, you know, we also want to use it not just as a way to bring the community together, but also to speak to our community. You know, we we do try and use it as a moment to talk to folks about, like, what's going on with their games, what's coming to ESO, or

76 or what's going on with Doom or, you know, whatever the case may be. We're going to be doing some of that again this year as well. In addition to things like, you know, how do we still have a dirty keyboard contest? How do we still get involved and help support, you know, various different charities, all of those kinds of things? But, you know, truthfully, there's just no real substitute for in person. At the same time, I think all of us, you know, the attendees, everyone at Bethesden, and all the volunteers, should never forget the volunteers, because QuayCon doesn't exist without our amazing volunteers. We all sort of agreed, look, yeah, that's true, but we can't do anything about that. So let's figure out how to have the most fun with this we

can and at least get together virtually as best we can until we can all get back together in person. And man, I sure am looking forward to that, hopefully next year. I say hopefully because I assume we're going to be past the, you know, the 47 different strains of this we're all going to have to deal with and be able to get back in person. You mentioned the dirty keyboard contest and the little birdie told me the other day that that's literally the only reason you go to QuayCon is because you love judging that contest so much. Is that true? That has a bald-faced lie. I got roped into that one year because I'm too nice to say no. and they were like, hey, would you come do this?

And I was like, what exactly you're going to have me do? And then I just, I don't know. Like, I did it once and then I became a regular. I definitely enjoy, I definitely enjoy doing it. It's really gross, especially in person. That's the part I don't mind doing virtually, where I don't have to have disgusting keyboards that light up like the 4th of July when you put a blue light on them.

Like, I'm totally fine being completely remote from those. But what's the grossest thing you've seen on a keyboard? He doesn't think real hard about that. No, I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this without like disgusting all of you that you don't want to eat lunch anymore because I know it's early out on the West Coast. There's a lot of things that you pray to God were like yogurt. How about that? Oh, my God. Wow.

It's disgusting. I'm guessing again right now, actually. I'll be right back. I actually got a little hungry. got to clean my keyboard now I don't think I'm cleaning my keyboard in like four five whenever we got our dog

is the last time I cleaned my keyboard because I literally see his like puppy fur in here and it's kind of gross it might be time yeah I think it might be time I'm just lazy you don't because you gotta pull him out and then you got to like

have your thing out I just honestly I'd just rather buy a new keyboard than clean this that's also an acceptable answer yeah so what um what are you guys doing differently with Quaecon this year virtually that you didn't do last year?

I don't think we're doing a ton differently. We're just sort of changing. Like, look, last year, we had this idiotic idea of doing nonstop, 72 hours of streaming around the world. I almost lost a few folks from my team trying to pull something like that off and keep the trains running. So we decided to pull back on the scope a little bit to not like, completely overdo it. But, you know, at its core, it's still the same thing, which is, you know, we want to have lots of fun things from the community. We've got some content, some things we're doing ourselves in terms

of like panels and talking about some of our games, like, hey, what's going on with Death Loop or ESO or stuff like that? But it's, you know, it's just like a, it's a iteration off of what we did last year where we're trying to sort of do more of what people like, do less of either what people didn't like as much or what nearly killed some of us and sort of right size it and do something that folks will enjoy. Again, even if we can't get together to have as much fun as we can while we're apart. And do you guys are doing it all through Discord? Am I, am I written on that? Okay. Yeah, there's an amazing QuayCon Discord channel and on that channel, There's like all kinds of sub-channels where like if you're only interested in certain kinds of games or like want to join up for contests or tournaments or it's pretty great.

And again, our community is like off the charts, amazing. Some of the most gracious welcoming folks you'll ever find in gaming. So you can do no wrong joining the Quakon Discord channel and joining in on the fun. Yeah, there's a, you know, there's like a Pix and Videos channel. There's a count to 7.5 billion channel. If you guys on account, you promote streams. They do contests and giveaways and, you know, individual folks who do streams. I did some goofy Fallout 76 challenge last year where you leave the vault basically in nothing but your vault suit.

And you drink a balls every time you get shot. No, you drink the, oh my God, I just spaced. The Nukashine, you drink a Nukashine, which randomly telepoints you to a point on the map. So everybody would leave the vault at once. Actually, for this one, there was that they had built like a base. So we go to the base, you drink the, you drink the Nukashine. It teleports you randomly somewhere on the map, and then you have to make it back to the base as fast as you can without dying. And it was sort of a contest to see how many times can you get back, touch base, drink another.

And you're level one. So you have nothing. You have no weapons. You have no, like, so you're literally just running from everything. You know, there's some folks who like try and level up and pick perks that help them go faster or, you know, sprint longer without getting tired. There's folks who will grab stuff and try and sell it so they can buy stuff in a store to give themselves an advantage. So there's all kinds of different fun challenges and community events going on. And you can find all of it in our Quakon Discord channel.

Yeah, linking it in the chat for you guys who want to check it out. Definitely join. It's cool. I've been keeping an eye on it for the past, I don't know, since I joined like last week or something. It's pretty cool. It's really awesome. Yeah.

You know, a lot of great people on there. Great folks. Yeah. Tell them I sent you. We'll do. I'll say right now in chat. Yo Pete sent us. Yo, Theo Pete.

Said hi. Or Ola, as the case may be. There we go. People on chat right now saying Pete sent me. Do it guys. Everyone do it right now. Yeah. folks out there on internet Twitchland

if you guys have any questions for Pete I know we had a couple in the past but we couldn't get to them because we're talking but if want to ask Pete any questions in the chat please go and drop them I'm just going to give you guys like the general like PR marketing, social media public facing person thing

we're not doing any announcements here nothing is being you know no new news is being shared please keep an eye on the Bethesda elder schools, whatever, subredits, discords, you know, for your news. Official channels.

I know, I know, yeah, yes, a matter of way. Yeah, but if you folks, any questions for either I mean Ivan or questions for Pete, please drop them in the chat. But until then, we're just going to BS a little bit.

Okay. One question I did see that someone was asking Pete when he was talking about working from home is they asked, did you, did you lose contact with your coworkers because you're working remotely.

Did you fall out of contact with people you used to work in proximity to? That was the question. No. No, not at all. We're a pretty tight-knit bunch at Bethesda. And so, again, it's certainly not easy. And it's the thing that I miss most about being the office, which is getting up out of my chair or out of my office and just walking over to chat with folks having a conversation. face to face being able to have impromptu discussions, you know, when you're all remote and in five

different houses, instead of just being able to walk by and go, hey, do you have a second to chat? Like, let's get together. We have a little conversation. Hey, what should we do about this? What does everybody think? You know, we talk about it. We figure it out. And we say, all right, let's do this.

You don't get to do that remotely, right? You've got to, you're sending a bunch of different Slack messages and who's around. And, but we're still very good about keeping up with each other. one of the things that we did in my department meetings was I instituted show and tell. Because in our department meetings, you know, my department is considerably bigger than the two people, myself and one other that it was when I started. And so one of the things I wanted to do to make sure we were all getting to see each other as I asked folks to do little show and tell presentations.

So like, it was everything from like, hey, if you've ever been interested in getting into hiking, here's a bunch of tips on hiking. or like Deaato, one of the ladies who works on QuakeCon for us on our events team, did one on wine pairings with Girl Scout cookies. Or, you know what I mean? Like it was just, we wanted to just have folks talking and presenting and everybody else in the department, getting to see them and hear from them because, like, we missed that part of being a part. So, you know, we did the best we could with happy hours and other things to try and make sure we were constantly getting together,

checking in on each other. You know, it was and still is a trying time for folks. You know, some folks are at home with little kids 24-7, which is a real challenge. There's other folks who are home all by themselves, which is a completely different kind of challenge. And, you know, we have just tried to do the best we can to support everybody, whatever their, whatever their circumstances are. Yeah, I actually like that show until I do. We should do that, Dennis. We should.

Tell Talley after this podcast. I'm going to write all these ideas down. We have another question here from Dragon Rush. So we've actually made two Bethesda cases. We have the H-700 Nuka-Cola, the H-500 Vault Boy, and Dragon Rush is asking, what Bethesda game would Pete like NZXT to make next into a case? That's a good question.

Do you want to honestly know something? I have been thinking about getting a custom PC built with a custom case. And here's my real challenge, which is it would be incredibly difficult for me to just pick one. Like I could do a cool outer space one and do like a Starfield thing. I could do like a Skyrim one. I could do a do. But like what I really want to do is all of the above one. Like I want to do one that's got like hints at.

dishonored and prey and Wolfenstein and Doom and elders. Because I've worked on all of those things. Like I've worked with people who, and myself included, have poured a lot of themselves into making those games, making them a success, making them fun. And so I got to figure out a way to do an all-encompassing case that has little nods and touches to all of the different things that I've got had the privilege of working on over the years.

Well, it's a good question. One that I am literally trying to figure out the answer to right now. So like a collage or like a mural kind of thing, right? You know what? I'm sure you have a lot of talented people in your community. So if anybody comes up with any really great designs or ideas on how to do a case that sort of encompasses all of my time at Bethesda and all the things we've made, find me on Twitter. DC Deacon on Twitter.

That's not a bad idea for a contest, Ivan. I could have a case that's like the hospital in San Juan. At the very top, right? And then the next. It's the side of the hospital in San Juan, but it's got like a painted mural on it that's got all the case. So we get a little of both, right? You get the origins and you get, yeah, if you got an idea, I would love to hear for me. Let me figure out how to build my next piece.

All right. The next question here is from Ripcord Jack. He wants to know, how do you guys tackle collectors slash special editions? How do you go about planning those things and selecting what goes in them? It's a long process. You have to start a very long time ahead of the game coming out. And it really just depends. We sort of talk amongst my team and my team is like,

everybody that works as brand managers or PR managers, community managers, content, you know, whoever it is, as well as all the developers, like, hey, what would, what would you love or what would get you really excited? Sometimes our devs have really strong ideas about a thing they want to make and we're like, sweet, sounds awesome, let's do that. Sometimes not. They're like, well, we could do this or we could do that. We have a pretty amazing, um, licensing and merch team at Bethesda between Mike and David and Jess that help us out a lot with putting us in touch with folks who do really cool things and figuring out how to create and make all of this stuff. And then it really, honestly, it just comes down to time. Like, you know, I know one of the things that always comes up is like, oh, you didn't make enough and I didn't get, didn't get one.

But like the amount of time that you have to build into a schedule to get all of these disparate things, even if you're just doing one thing. like making a bunch of one thing that has to go out on three different platforms and God only knows how many languages and God only knows how many countries and having time to do all that backing it up from when the game is going to come out. It's a lot harder than you think. And man, now it's even worse, right? I don't have to tell anybody things like plastic or if you've tried to order parts and suddenly your arrival date keeps slipping by three months or something. six months because it's hard to find components or there's a world plastic shortage or whatever the hell the case might be. It's even more, it's even more difficult. But usually we try and do stuff that we feel like really resonates with the core fan of whatever that thing is. And we also are really

big fans as much as possible of doing stuff that feels like it came from the game. Do you know what I mean, like, you know, the helmet that we did for Doom Eternal, like, oh, that looks like his helmet or, you know, like what we did for fallout with the Pipboys. Like, we like doing stuff that feels like it's real and from the world as opposed to a made-up thing that represents something from the game, at least as much as we can. But, you know, even for things like the Elder Scrolls, we, if we do a character, like, we wanted to look like a statue that you would find in the game for that thing, right? you're going to do, you know, a Mayroon's daagon statue. Like, well, it needs to look like a thing you would find in the world, not like a, not like a toy that we just invented. I want that helmet.

I know, dude, I was trying to get that, but I missed out. I think I fell asleep when they were supposed to sell the cliche. They didn't get one. Yep. They go quick. Yeah, no, they do. The next question is a good one here from Twin Dad. All right.

Quake 1V1. which John wins Romero or Carmack I have no idea whoever wins we lose right I actually wanted to ask about that because I was super excited when it joined Bethesda because I mean I mean we've seen what happened

since then right like it's been amazing how how was that like just having them join you guys say hey we're software we're here now We do all these, all these, all these, all these great games. There's like, walk in slow motion into the offices and just like, what's good or like, no, we do not do that. You know, we try very hard to, to make sure that, you know, whether it's id or arcane or machine games or tango, any of these studios that we have acquired over the years that we really,

at number one, we know who they are and what they, their culture is like and we feel like their culture and our culture share a lot of similar values. So it's not a big like culture shock. And we try much as we can to simply support what they're doing and help them do what they're doing even better. You know, the acquisition of Id, like that didn't get off to like the easiest smoothest start. If you remember, like they were making rage with somebody else when we acquired them. And then like that stops. So then we picked up rage sort of midstream.

And then as, you know, I'm not spilling any secrets. This is well-worn territory. But they were working on a version of a new Doom game that quite honestly, they didn't, they just didn't love. They didn't feel like it was the right tone or vibe or direction. And quite honestly, we, we agreed. And we essentially started over on a game that had been in development for a while and had been spent a lot of time and money on. and made a really hard choice to, listen, we're going to, we're going to take another crack at this and do it right. And that's how we got, you know, Doom in 2016 in the game that that was.

That was the most stressful part and most difficult part because, you know, you're not talking about, oh, well, you lost a few months of progress or, you know, a few dollars. Like, no, you don't run a team or a studio for years and not have it cost a lot of money. Yeah, I can imagine. And making the tough decision to say, we have enough confidence and faith to start this over again is not anything that anybody takes lightly, including the folks at Id themselves. I mean, I have heard Marty Stratton speak often over the years since then about, you know, the importance of the support that he got from Bethesda and Zinnamax and our belief in them that, you know, we are going to take this chance and start over again. because we think ultimately will come out of it is the best game possible. Instead of saying, look, just do the best you can with what we've already got. You know, we're already far down the path.

Like just see that through to completion. It would not have been difficult for us as a company to say that, but I think we made the tougher decision to say, look, if it's not the right game, then this has all been a giant waste of time. And if you're telling us that this isn't the right game, like we get what you're referring to and we kind of have the same feeling. And so let's let's give it a shot. And what you got as a result is, you know,

a pretty amazing game in Doom 2016 and a pretty amazing follow-up in Doom Eternal. But for all of these studios, look, there's always the most important thing in being good at making video games is having the experience of making a game with those same people, right? You could take like the best programmers in the world, regardless of where they work, with the best character artists and the best animators and designers and writers and throw all of those disparate people into a room and say make, you know, an amazing game and it'll be a complete and utter disaster.

It's sort of like when you watch a like an all-star game, right? And you're like, these guys don't even look like they've ever played with each other. You know, it's a lot like the more you're used to working together and how best to work together, the better you get at it. And that goes beyond development. Like it's one thing just for the studio making the game, for them to have experience working together and get more efficient and understand their processes. But then there's all of these other things that have to happen in order for that game to be a success, right? Right.

Like my team, which is, well, you can't just make it until it's done and then ship it without telling anybody until the day it's out. Like, we have to do some work to get people excited about it. Show them what you're making. Like, let them know why they should care, which requires them to do things along the way that aren't necessarily. focused on getting the game done, right? Something like E3 can be a great moment for a studio because sometimes a studio director, a game director will tell you,

like, actually, I really like that we're sort of having to hold to delivering this E3 asset because it gets the team really focused when they know, hey, this is going to be something the public is going to see, right? Because a dirty little secret about video games is they are broken, more or less, the whole time that you're developing until you get to the end, right? There's always bugs.

there's always issue some global illumination things, some, you know, all the characters are T-posing around the world because there's an animation bug. Like getting the game to look ready for public viewing is a very different and stressful thing. And working as a team through that process and understanding what everybody needs in order to make that happen

and working towards that same goal. Like there's no replacement for doing that together. And once you do it once, and you have something to build on to do the next one, even better. Once you do that, and so that's why you see a studio like, Ed or Bethesda Game Studios, like they get better and better every game they work on together because they understand better what each other's strengths or weaknesses are or, you know, who brings what to the table, or even just something as simple as, hey, this is the point at which

we have to stop adding things to the game. Because adding things to a game is the quickest way to delay a game. Like, you're generally far better off. with addition by subtraction and cutting things that might have sounded good on paper, but in execution, like, you know what, this isn't all that fun, or it's way too repetitive, or it's fun the first time, and then it gets really boring, and, like, making those hard decisions and having that trust in each other to say, hey, this is the right choice to, you know, to shelve this, or, you know, let's wait and put more time into it for a DLC or, you know, do it as post-launch, you know, update or whatever.

is a difficult thing to replicate until you've gone through it. Yeah, I have a little bit of experience before here. I was working at a at a game publisher and I mean, you're absolutely right, you know. I'm I'm such a like student like from afar. I just like game development and just like how these things work. You know, like any any bit of info I can get from like anything, you know, like if like any article comes out, I'm always reading it and just looking into it. And yeah, no, it's one of those things where like you have to really decide like what the core. experience of the game you're making is and then you kind of stick to that right you focus on that

because you know i i know there's been a lot of projects that you know have like crashed and burn because they try to add way too many things and then it just it just never comes out or it doesn't come out in like a polished state and they have like a lot of cool features but none of them really work well together or they're just there to be there so yeah it's it's great um while you were talking it was actually throwing up uh uh that uh footage from no clip where they went and they and they spoke to the to the, uh, to the doom team, um, about like, uh, the development of was like Doom 4, right? And like how that looked like. And yeah, just like the stark difference from what Doom 4 was going to be to what Doom 2016 was. It's night and day. Yeah. Insane. And like, I remember playing

that game and just like from the first, I think actually, I think you guys actually showed off the first footage at QuakeCon right for 2016. Yeah. And I remember I saw that first is intro where Doom guy wakes up and I'm like, this is it. Like they've, they've done it. Like they somehow figured out this game that I used to play when I was, you know, a little kid on my dad's, you know, uh, uh, MS DOS computer. And they somehow just took all that and, and updated it for, you know, 20, 30 something year old me. And it was, it was, it was, it was great, you know, it's a, if you were in that room the first time we showed that game off, that was a really, that's one of those like I was there when that. Yeah. For those who don't know, we showed it off at QuakeCon.

And we showed it behind closed doors at the end of our welcome. So we turned off the stream and we said, okay, we're just showing this for you. Like, put your phones away. Don't stream it. No photos. Like, we just want to do this here with the QuayCon community. And the best part of that was I had this idea that Marty Stratton had done this presentation before about Doom and what it was. And it used like PowerPoint.

And it was a bunch of like concept art and stuff. And I was like, Marty, what would you think about starting your presentation? presentation off with a PowerPoint. Like, I love the idea of head faking everybody into thinking, like, son of a bitch, they hype this up and all I get is a goddamn PowerPoint with concept art. And sure enough, it took, like, there are people. I remember one of my colleagues was sitting with the press folks and the press guys are like, oh, my God, are they really just going to show a PowerPoint?

This is a disaster. And then Marty, like, after, you know, it wasn't long. It was like five, seven minutes. He's like, all right, but there's nothing better than seeing the game. And everybody was like, yeah. And then they played it live on the stage. front of everybody. And it was like a religious experience, like watching people who have such a deep love for something, see it brought back to life in that way. Like, it was, you know, if you're on

that dev team, as many of them were in that studio, like, I can't imagine any more empowering moment to go back in the office and finish this thing than watching. I don't remember how many people we squeezed in that room. We were full. Whatever, dear fire marshal, whatever the rule was, We stuck to that number and didn't go over by one. I swear to God. But that room just lost its mind for the whole thing with the chainsaws and the glory kills. And it was like, okay, we got something. Like, you know, because, again, that was the first point at which we got validation on,

holy shit is canceling that last thing and starting all over again. Like, is it, you know, you're never really sure on anything that you at least died. Maybe some people are. I'm not. Like, I worked on Skyrim. And at no point in that game was like, oh, this is going to be amazing. It's a, you know, I can't miss. Like I don't, I'm not wired that way.

I'm always looking for what did we miss? Where are the problems? Where the, you know, that kind of thing. And so even though we, we thought it was great, it was still a, you never really sure just how folks are going to react. And it was 10 times. I think what any of us expected. It was, it was something special.

Yeah. I remember seeing the threads like show up on. read it like oh they showed off due in 2016 it's gonna be great and I'm like I why did I miss this like why didn't I go like I should have gone this year I I don't remember if there were rumors that like that that you guys were gonna show off doom but like I remember like somebody told me it's like hey you should probably go this year and I'm we said at E3 that year we did a little teaser at E3 and said we were gonna do the full reveal at QuakeCon so we but we also said like hey you gotta be at QuakeCon if you

want to see this. We're not, we're not showing everybody. I know, that's, uh, that's, uh, probably one of my favorite games in like the last, honestly, like 10 years, I think. Like, it was, it was, it was a good choice. Yeah. Um, especially for me, like I mentioned earlier, like, you know, I literally, like, upgraded to my PC so I can play Doom and Wolfenstein and like, I grew up on those games. And when I, when I saw like, Doom 2016, yeah, it like, you know, brought me back in. it stuck me back in. I was like, man, they did it.

Like, they made it even more awesome than I remembered. And thank God they kept the other one, right? Yep. Yeah, no, it was one of those things where, you know, you take the, like, the tone and, like, the feeling of a game. And he's like, yep, this, this is it. This feels right. This feels like it's supposed to.

And, you know, it was great. So thanks, Pete. It was my idea. I take credit for all of it. I did all the coding for that and the art. And it was a lot of work. That's all that works. He wrote the manual.

Yeah. I can't. I can't. I can't code or draw it to save my life. If you're waiting on me to contribute to a game, you are screwed. I am the same way. Like when I was growing up, my folks would be like, you play so many games. You should go to school to make them.

I'm like, I'm not that smart. I'm sorry. Like, there's no way I could ever, ever code a video game. Like I just, I was going to enjoy talking about them and doing the things. And playing them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, just to support everybody else.

Here's an interesting question from Death Rage. What's your favorite game you wished was a part of Bethesda so you could improve it or change it up with it. Nope. Nope. Not touching that. That's how we get completely misleading headlines. Oh, yeah. Pete Hines wants to make the next blank shows up on that. Nope.

Sorry. Not touching that. No, thank you. Pete Hines wants to add glory kills to Super Mario Brothers. Nope. Not touching it. I haven't. answer but I'm not telling you what it is because

that you're talking in the chat Mario Glory killing a turtle all right so twin dad wants to know do you have a treasured promotional item from a game just one I mean I have like tons because what's your like most prized promotional yeah promotional yeah from a game promotional item from a game promotion item from a game. Like, um, I guess like the pit boy, I guess would be one. The doom helmet.

Yeah, I have, uh, I could show it to you. You want me to, you want me to grab it? It's in the next room. Hold on it's right here. Didn't, um, I was thinking, Ivan, like, um, like for promo stuff. Like, didn't, uh, Dante's Inferono? Do you remember that game? Send.

Yeah. Send people like something really freaking weird. Like, to like PR and press, I forget. I don't remember. So this doesn't, it's not exactly a promotion. item. But I really, I really love the, the Brotherhood of Steel

Helmut that we did, the Power Armor Helmut we did for Fallout. And we did a, we did a special thing with a bunch of artists to have them do different custom paint jobs. And I actually won this one at an auction because I just thought it was really cool. And because my wife liked it. Like she liked the creepy eye and all that stuff.

My wife is weird. She likes horror movies and stuff. stuff. So that's a particular favorite of mine. I'm in the process of moving all my stuff here there. I also really love, you can see them in the background, but I have old Xboxes that are custom skinned. I have a Skyrim 1, a Falla 31, and a Fallout 41. I don't use them anymore. They were all functional and well worn at one time. We did those as like special giveaways. But my office, like at one point, I need to do like a virtual tour of my office because, my God, I have so much stuff from 22 years at the company of like that I have held on to from

all of these different games. I need to do like a little video tour to show it off. Like it's everything. It's, you know, VGA awards and, you know, everything. Chotchkes and collectors edition stuff. Yeah, I was watching such listening to the giant bomb cast and a Jeff Gertzman has like a, he has a grip of stuff too. This, I mean, because he's been working.

you know in like in like games press for like the longest time so yep yeah I mean he just has a collection like just the weirdest the weirdest shit from like all kinds of like press events and stuff like I know every now and then they'll like get into stories about like how they're they're like flown out to like a castle or something for like some some press event and like all kinds of crazy stuff that used to happen back in the day um so yeah it's it's it's always cool to see that stuff um I forget I was talking to someone yesterday about back for blood um and this is from Trude Rock Studios, right? The same devs that did evolve.

And I was just looking up articles because I remember, like, there's like, there's a huge, like, you know, a lot of conversation about that game. And I stumbled across the article about that $750 statue that they made for that. And I was like, I know somebody has one of those evolved statues. And I kind of, I kind of want to get one. Just is like a, just like a point of history. I think I had a giant massive thing. Yeah.

One of my favorite things we ever did was the, and of course, I don't have one here. My wife would leave me if I tried to put one in our house. But we did giant full-size Brotherhood of Steel statues for Fallout 3. And they were in retail stores. And like if you go to Game Informer or Xbox or Sony, there's some of our partners that we sent one to as well. There's one in our office. But that was a particular favor because everybody just absolutely loved them. Love taking pictures with them.

I still have people send me pictures of like ones that they had. I remember I went to a store opening at a GameStop and they, I think they raffled off or gave away the statue that they had in their store to one lucky fan who wanted to take it home. So that was a particular favorite because that was a really challenging thing to sort of bring Fallout back while also making it, you know, know, it was a, it was a different kind of game. It wasn't a top-down isometric. It was first person and third person and very different. But we also tried to have a lot of fun with the IP and fallout and sort of why we thought

it was such a cool franchise and game series in the first place. And I particularly remember those statues were a lot of damn work to do. You want to talk about collector's additions being tough. Try making a few thousand giant statues that you have to ship around the world. You know, they're all seven, eight feet tall. That was no easy task. How much of those things even weigh? A lot.

I remember how much, because we've done a number of them over the years, but like, they were heavy. I'm trying to find a photo of it, but I do have a photo on the stream of that giant, I don't know what they're called anymore, but that giant robot Nazi dog thing. Mr. Handy. Oh, wait, the Panzer Hunt? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go. Yeah, that thing. Just a photo of this. giant statue at the Bethes offices.

That thing is almost literally standing outside of my office. Oh, really? Yeah. And imagine it's like you just turn over it. Oh, hey, yeah, there's that giant murder machine. The funny thing is we've had a number of other things. Over the years in there, we put some, uh, we put a boxman statue in there from the evil within.

Oh, cool. And, um, we, we had too many, um, families bringing, their kids to the office that it was not going over well with the youngsters. So we had to take our horrifying survival horror thing and put it somewhere in the building so we wouldn't scare the kids. That's so funny. But it's still really cool. So this is what boxman looks like. I can't find a photo of the actual.

I just sent you a picture. I found out of the fall of three guy if you want to share it. I know I have one of it in our office. Yeah. Oh, yeah, really got the. You can actually see him behind the, uh, the Panzer Hun in that picture. If you look, he's, he's back. Yeah, he's peeking a little bit, right?

And there's a Dovikeen up the stairs above him and see, that's part of like, I miss being in the office. Yeah, some of stuff. Yeah. You know, I've spent all of these years walking and taking for granted every day walking into our, our building lobby. And, you know, there's a, the Doom Slayer and the, um, Doviken and. and we have a working Mr. Handy robot that we did one year for Fallout 4 at E3. That's awesome.

Seriously, he's motion, he has motion detection, he'll talk to you and stuff. We had to turn him off because people are constantly walking by it and he talks and the receptionist is going insane. That's so funny. For Mr. Handy constantly talking. But yeah, you sort of miss that stuff. You know, you take for granted getting to see that and walk by it every day. I look forward to being able to do that on a regular basis. That's great.

Yeah. All right. So we're going to go ahead and wrap it up here, Pete. I'm sure you're very busy, you know, drinking balls and, you know, judging. Quaycon is coming in a handful of days and trying to get everything ready for that. Yeah, that whole thing, right? Craigon. Before we bounce, do you have anything you want to let the people know about?

Anything you want to like shout out, plug? Any people you always want to say thanks to? Anything like that? Well, again, to both of you, hey, congrats on 100 episodes. That's a great accomplishment. Congrats. And yeah, I mean, honestly, just thanks to everybody who tuned in and watch. I wasn't joking about the custom PC thing.

If you have a cool idea for a case that I ought to do for my new PC, please send me a tweet at DC Deacon on Twitter, are the DC Deacon on Instagram. I would love to see your ideas and maybe I'll work with these guys to figure out how to buy myself a new PC with a sweet custom case. I think we know a place that sells computers.

I think you do too. Thank you, P, for coming on and we're looking forward to QuakeCon. And speaking of QuakeCon, we will be doing a pretty cool free PC giveaway for QuayCon weekend. So be sure to follow MZT and QuayCon. The details of the giveaway will be revealed

on Thursday, August 19th. Super soon. Yeah, so in two weeks from today. And yeah, it's going to be cool. We're doing a spoiler alert, custom wrapped QuayCon PC here. And you guys can see what it looks like on social pretty soon. And yeah, just follow Pete on Twitter, D.C. Deacon,

and Instagram the DC Deacon if you want to see them unboxing soccer cards. And you two need to make sure to make plans for Quakon next year. When we get back to in person, you owe it to yourself at least once in your life to come down to Dallas and experience it for yourself. Yeah, I have a list. I have a dream hack I want to go to. That's a good one. QuakeCon, gamers outreach also does. They're like big land party.

I want to do that as well because we work with them a lot. And they send me a really cute statue. And I want to, actually I'll show it off here because I have. But I want to like thank them. It seems so cool. It's like their little play card thing. It's great. It's heavy.

I'll only go if you show me the new doom. There's a new doom? I don't know. I don't know either. Who knows Ivan? There's always something new. You know, you can still play Eternal right now, right? Like they're still updating Eternal.

There's still stuff on that. You should put up on that. It's hard too, by the way. Just let you know. 2016 to Eternal, not even the same. Like it's so, yeah, it's so hard, so hard. I, there are moments, as I said to say, it was great, there are moments where I had to literally take a break physically

because my brain was like mentally like, I was just like dead. I was like, I can't do this. I can't take a break and you to step outside. It was too much. Yep. You got to know the loop. You got to know that combat loop. Yeah.

How to kill them to get what you need to. Yeah. And that's what it was. It was that loop that was just like, I was like super zoned in. And I was like at a certain point, I need to take a break from this because I'm doing a lot of stuff. switching and I'm using the wrong weapons and I'm getting killed. Well, we will hopefully I get to see you guys at about a year down in Dallas next year for

Quiccon and and meet you in person finally. For sure. We'll bring our, we'll bring our dirty keyboards for you. Yeah. And I'll grab you a, I don't know, a plaque or something. You can travel and throw down instead of one. Brilliant. All right.

Let me see here real quick. Light production, folks. So live production. Don't blame me for this. We can add this in post, so it's not a big deal. There we go. Okay, so with that, thank you again for joining us, Pete. Really, really appreciate it.

You taking time out to hang with us. Happy to do it. Thanks for having me on. And thank you to everybody who tuned in. Remember to tune in next week at 10 a.m. Besever Center time on the official NZ60 Twitch channel and follow at NZ60 on all relevant and relevant social media. And if you want, you can send an email to Clubcast at NZE,

T.com if you want to ask us a question off the air and we'll answer it. I'm getting a little spam on there. People want to like promote our SoundCloud. That's not really how it works when you have a podcast, but you know, sure, whatever. Don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. And also, if you can do us a super huge favor, biggest favor in the world, I'm going to turn it down for a second. Show the podcast with a friend or someone you don't like.

Actually, I think it's better if you share it with an enemy because maybe they'll turn into a friend for turning you on to this amazing show. think about that. All right guys. With that, thank you very much. And we'll see you next time. Bye.